Finland was and still is a multilingual state. The majority of the population speaks Finnish, but a minority are Swedish-speaking, the remainder of the elite from Finland’s time in the Swedish Empire. In the 1910s, approximately 11% of Finland’s population was Swedish speaking. [1] This natural division within Finnish society played an important role in the Civil war.

In the Reds

“He cannot be a Red Guardist since he even speaks Swedish.”[2]

This quote was spoken by a White Guard when asked to explain why he spared one captured Red Guard, while he executed others. The popular perception of the Reds regarding the ethnolinguistic issue was that they were anti-Swedish. This is only half true.

The Swedish speaking minority in Finland are the remainders of the Swedish nobility from Finland’s time in the Swedish Empire. After Russia annexed Finland, much of this nobility continued to hold power. This meant that in 1918, a large portion of the economic and political elite were Swedish speaking Finns. The socialists opposed the Swedish speakers because they represented the bourgeois class enemy, not because of their language. By no means were all Swedish speaking Finns wealthy, many were not and many supported the socialists prior to the Civil War.

Red Finland’s leadership, the People’s Delegation, was not officially anti-Swedish. However, several decrees by the People’s Delegation hinted that there would be. Paragraph 15 of the Red Finnish Constitution referenced insuring rights to a linguistic minority, but it was presented with sufficient vagueness to make Finns fear the minority was not intended to be Swedish but Russian.[3]

The Red leadership did not official persecute the Swedish speaking minority, but on the more local level, especially in the socialist press, Reds attempted to mobilize anti-Swedish Finnish nationalism.[4]  Some Red propaganda even tried to appeal to the Whites by framing the Civil War as a War of Liberation from Swedish oppression, just as the White were doing with the Russians. The newspaper Kansan Lehti (People’s Journal) elaborated on this:

“Does [the White soldier] not understand that he should rejoice that at last the moment of the liberation of the Finnish-speaking people has arrived.”[5]

Despite this hate, there is no indication that the ethnolinguistic conflict influenced the Red Terror. Swedish-speaking Finns were murdered in the Red Terror, but analysis can explain that these killings were more concerned with class and economic status rather than language.[6]

The largest effect that the Red’s anti-Swedish rhetoric was that it quite possibly made many working class Swedish-speaking Finns choose not to become involved in the Civil War.

The Whites

Since the Swedish speaking Finns were disproportionally the elite within Finland, they therefore formed a large part of the Whites during the Civil War. One of the political parties that formed the conservative coalition that formed the Whites was the Swedish People’s Party, a political party that fought for Swedish language rights. Furthermore, a large number of the members of the Activists and the 27^th Jägers were Swedish speaking.[7]

The Whites were not without ethnolinguistic debate. A large portion of the White officer corps were either Swedish speaking Finns, or volunteer officers from Finland. Many of the Whites, were Fennomans, nationalistic Finns that sought the dominance of Finnish language in the future Finnish state. Fennomans opposed the socialists fiercely and were willing to cooperate with Swedish speaking Finns to win the war, but they did not like having to be subordinate to the Swedish. General Mannerheim recognized this growing animosity, and decreed that all orders and communiques within the White forces needed to be composed in Finnish first, with an accompanying Swedish translation if necessary.[8]

The Fennomans and Swedes maintained a begrudging alliance while they fought their common enemy, but once victory had been obtained they turned on one another. The Fennomans sought to consolidate independent Finland as a pro-German state, and wished to lessen Swedish involvement. Volunteer Swedish officers were expelled from the country, and this was one of the reasons General Mannerheim eventually resigned his post. [9]

For more on the post-war schism in the Whites: Click Here

 

Citations

[1] Pekka Kalevi Hamalainen, The Nationality Struggle between the Finns and the Swedish-Speaking Minority in Finland, 1917-1939 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Indiana University Press, 1966), 16.

[2] Pekka Kalevi Hamalainen, In Time of Storm: Revolution, Civil War, and the Ethnolinguistic Issue in Finland (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 86.

[3] Ibid., 60.

[4] Ibid., 56–58.

[5] Ibid., 58.

[6] Ibid., 110–12.

[7] D. G. Kirby, Finland in the Twentieth Century: A History and an Interpretation (University Of Minnesota Press, 1980), 36–37.

[8] Hamalainen, In Time of Storm, 80.

[9] C. Jay Smith, Finland and the Russian Revolution 1917-1922 (University of Georgia Press, 1958), 108; Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, The Memoirs of Marshal Mannerheim, trans. Eric Lewenhaupt (London: Cassell and Company Ltd, 1953), 182–83.

Banner Photo – Red Officers during the Battle of Lahti. Credit – J. O. Hannula.